More advanced Airline award ticket routing techniques

A previous article was written for #101ers. This is the second half of that article, split up for #201 level and above Milenomics.

One of the biggest negatives I have with airlineroutemaps.com is that for international travel the site often shows truncated maps. For searching domestic routes, or familiarizing with cities served it does a fine job.

Example of British Airways map from airlineroutemaps.com. Where are these flights originating from?

As opposed to www.airlineroutemaps.com Airline Route mapper is much more powerful software. I use it all the time when booking award tickets, or looking for ideas where to go with my miles. It can be downloaded here: http://arm.64hosts.com/, and can even be run from a flash drive. I like to keep a flash drive with it on me when I travel. That way I can refer to it even on a computer with no internet capability.

The program is amazing, and I can’t say enough about it. Not only is it free, but it is frequently updated and also has a good thread on flyertalk about it here:

The title image of this post is the equivalent British Airways route map from LHR as displayed in Airline Route mapper. As you can see airline route mapper allows you to pan and zoom, expanding the map to see the whole earth, or zooming in to pick airports that are close to one another.

Another fantastic option in the software is the ability to see distances between two points. Click a starting city, and a destination city, and hover your mouse over the route line. Listed will be the distance along with every airline that flies the route, as well as what equipment they use to service the route.

Example of distance calculation LAX-LHR.

The information in Airline Route Mapper can help for award tickets, or revenue tickets. Searching for nonstop segments between two cities is quick and simple with airline route mapper. For Avios award tickets you can get approximate distances right in the program, and estimate Avios based on that.

With travel there’s no “Silver Bullet,” or single tool that does it all. That said, Airline Route Mapper is easily a tool that if it disappeared I’d be at a loss to replace it.